The Downtown Farm Stand: Your Crispy Dough-main

Dave and Sara Ring can tell you the exact number of hours their pizza dough needs to sit before it's ready: 72. It's a long cold ferment, one that gives the natural yeast time to break down the gluten enough to stretch paper-thin without tearing. It's a detail most customers will never think about while they're eating a slice. But it's the reason a regular with diabetes told The Downtown Farm Stand she can eat a full pizza and test her blood sugar the next morning without a spike. 

That kind of specificity is what's behind Hoosier Crispy Pizza, the newest identity of a business that's spent nearly two decades reinventing itself in the same downtown storefront. 

Why Pizza & Why Now? 

The Farm Stand's restaurant side started as a lunch counter, known throughout the 2010s for scratch-made paninis and sandwiches. The COVID-19 pandemic changed that. Home delivery quadrupled almost overnight, lunch traffic never fully recovered, and Dave and Sara spent the next few years testing new directions to take their business. They cycled the menu through healthy bowls, comfort food, and smash burgers, looking for something that could carry them the way paninis once had. None of it had staying power until Dave retrofitted the restaurant's existing ovens to work as pizza ovens. The response to this test was immediate. The Farm Stand experienced strong early sales, glowing reviews, and a style of pizza nobody else in town was making. 

The Popular Crust 

Hoosier Crispy Pizza is patterned after East Coast styles out of New Haven, Connecticut, and Trenton, New Jersey. They are thin, crispy, and built on a sourdough base rather than a quick-rise dough. And despite the name, don't expect a tangy bite. The 72-hour cold ferment does double duty. It gives the crust that light, airy texture customers describe as “filling but never heavy,” and it's gentle enough on the system that several customers with dietary restrictions now count Hoosier Crispy as a pizza they can enjoy. A small choice in the kitchen, and a big deal for the people finally getting to order a slice again.  

The pizzas are served Wednesday through Saturday, with the full 14" menu available all day and a 10" option added at lunch, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Most of the pizzas carry a name with a Muncie wink built in. The Letterman, a three-cheese classic, nods to Muncie's own David Letterman. Garfield's Pie, a tomato-forward pizza light on the mozzarella, is a tip of the hat to Jim Davis, the Garfield creator who also studied at Ball State. Close Encounters, a mushroom pie built on organic cremini mushrooms and sweet onions, references the film that name-dropped Muncie as its setting. Ordering pizza now carries its own little piece of local trivia. 

The Grocery Store That Started It All 

Pizza is the newest chapter, but it's built on top of the original idea of starting a downtown grocery store stocked with organic, local food. Dave and Sara opened it in 2007 after years of selling their own farm's produce at a small market they'd started on Walnut and Charles, wanting to give other local producers a place to sell and give downtown residents access to groceries they couldn't otherwise reach on foot. The shelves are still stocked with the same staples they've carried since day one, including organic produce, local proteins, eggs, and cheese. The home delivery service that boomed during the pandemic never went away either. Customers can still build a produce bin online and have it delivered straight to their door. 

Family-Run 

Dave and Sara's kids, Zach and Lena, have grown up in the business and now work alongside them, the latest generation of a family that's spent nearly twenty years shaping the Farm Stand around what downtown Muncie needs. Upstairs, that same instinct shows up in The Second Story, a converted dance hall now rented out for banquets and events for up to 50 guests, where hosts can build their catering around the same Hoosier Crispy pizza that's quickly become a downtown favorite. 

The Farm Stand has changed shape more than once over the years, growing from a small farmers market into a grocery store and, most recently, a full-blown pizzeria. Dave and Sara don't see that as a series of pivots so much as a habit of paying attention to what the community wants. That habit has made them downtown's longest continuously operating restaurant, and with a gluten-free crust and a Caesar salad both in the works, it isn't slowing down. Only in DWNTWN.